Strenght of a Banshee
by thugzangelz
Summary: Lydia sees death every time she looks at Derek. She can see his death, smell his death, feel his death, every time she encounters him. She turns up at his loft in the middle of the night. Is this the end for Derek Hale?


Derek was generally the stoic member of the pack. The "sourpuss" as Stiles liked to call him when he thought Derek couldn't hear. Derek was never the first any of them would pick to talk to unless they need information or help with something. Even then, they would try to go to Chris Argent before consulting him. Derek was fine with this. Truth be told, he found it incredibly hard to enjoy himself when most of his family was dead. When he started feeling happy, something would always pop up that would remind him of everything he had lost.

For the most part, Derek was willingly aloof the emotions of his pack mates. He would only step in if someone was so off-balanced that they were a risk to themselves and the rest of the pack. Most of the time, it was Scott who he had to console, advise and encourage. Rarely, it would be Stiles. It was never Lydia.

Lydia was intelligent, brave and confident in the ways the rest of the pack lacked. She was self-motivated and knew how to pick herself up when things go wrong. She was mature beyond her years due to being ignored by both of her parents for most of her life. Lydia had survived a boyfriend becoming a killing lizard, her best friend dying whilst trying to save her life, and another boyfriend dying while trying to prove he was a good guy to her. Lydia was a survivor and she helped the rest of the pack as well. Her strength has helped carry the pack through so much pain, destruction and death.

So her behaviour over the past couple of weeks was incredibly confusing to Derek. She had been avoiding the pack. She was skipping out on meetings, avoiding going to lacrosse games and opting to tell Kira any information she needed to give to the pack. The whole pack was confused. Especially considering every time Scott caught remnants of Lydia's scent around town, it smelt incredibly sad, guilty and worried. She hadn't smelt this way since the Nogitsune debacle. Scott has confided in him, unsure how to deal with the situation. As far as Derek knew, there was nothing for her to feel this way for. Meredith was in custody and being trialed with an iron clad defense against her, the dead pool was over and Argent and Deaton were tracking down Kate to figure out what she did to Derek's werewolf abilities. Everything was quiet and seemed to be falling into place.

What further confused Derek was that the less the pack was seeing Lydia, the more he was. She rarely spoke to him, sometimes she didn't even acknowledge him. It was just at random times around town or a few times she would come to the loft to ask how Cora was doing before leaving. For the most part, Derek believe they were coincidences. What was confusing is the fact that he goes to the same places every week and has been doing so for a long time, yet he had only been seeing Lydia at those places over the last few weeks.

It was with a shock that Lydia showed up at the door to Derek's loft in the middle of the night and screamed. Her scream was agonizing and Derek could see the regret dripping off her. Braeden quickly ducked over to the bed to put a shirt on while Derek grabbed the blanket to wrap around Lydia. She was soaked to the bone and her lips were blue. She began to shiver as she came down from her banshee high. Derek saw her eyes begin to focus as she took in her surroundings. As Lydia slowly came back to herself, Derek did not need his werewolf senses to feel her guilt and sadness skyrocket. She was shivering uncontrollably by now, even wrapped in the blanket.

"Could you grab one of my shirts for her to put on? She's soaked through." Derek asked Braeden as he did something his mother had done for him many years ago when he was distressed. He pulled Lydia to his chest, wrapped his arms around her and began rubbing up and down her back with one arm, while gently massaging the base of her neck with the other.

Derek is not sure if the neck rubbing was just a wolf pleasure or if it felt relaxing to everyone. However, he was spurred on in his actions when he felt Lydia's shivers slowing down and her heartbeat decreasing. Braeden handed him one of his shirts and a pair of her loose shorts for Lydia. She watched him closely to see what he was planning to do with the young girl.

"Lydia?" He asked gently. "I have some dry clothes for you to put on. I'm going to turn around, ok? You need to put these on and we need to get you warmed up. Do you understand?"

Lydia nodded as she took the clothes from him. Her freezing cold hands brushed against his warmer ones. Derek was worried about hypothermia or pneumonia. He was going over a list of symptoms in his head, recalling if he had noticed Lydia showing any signs of them. Braeden cleared her throat when Lydia was dressed, unsure of how to proceed with the younger girl. Derek turned back around and started analyzing everything about Lydia, trying to see if there was anything pointing to her needing to go to the hospital.

"I walked around naked for 3 days in below zero temperatures, I don't think a little rain is going to kill me." Lydia joked weakly, trying to break the tension as she noticed him looking her over.

"How did you get here?" Derek asked, remember her muddy, wet socks that she had been wearing earlier without shoes.

Lydia sighed. "I'm fairly certain I walked. Although, it's hard to tell, it all just seems like a bleary dream."

Derek had enough experience with Lydia to know what that meant. This was a really severe banshee moment. Normally, it was as if she zoned out, and got distracted on her way somewhere. She would be conscious of what she was doing and where she was going, only she wouldn't know why and she wouldn't know to question it. If she felt like it was a dream she had no control over, it meant the voices and urges that her powers made her sensitive to were so strong she had no control over it.

He beckoned her over to sit on the lounge chair and wrapped the blanket around her again to help her get warm as he sat down next to her. Braeden dragged over a small gas heater and turned it on before sitting across from Lydia and Derek. Lydia took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down and force out the next words.

"Normally my powers make me sensitive to voices and sounds that are like clues. I have to put the pieces of the clues together to work out who is going to die and how they are going to die. Sometimes I don't get any clues and I just know at the time who is dying and how. With Allison, I don't know how to explain it, but the second the Nogitsune kidnapped me, I just knew she wouldn't be safe if she came to find me. So I left her a message that she knew was for her alone. She ignored it and… that happened." Lydia inhaled deeply before continuing.

"With Aiden, from day one, I just got this feeling. I couldn't explain it at the time but I now know it was a warning. That every day he spent around me was bringing him closer and closer to death. If we hadn't have gotten as close as we did, he wouldn't have been in that fight and wouldn't have died." Lydia shut her eyes, trying to push back the pain that came with knowing two people she loved died for her.

She opened her eyes and looked at Derek. "With you, it's different. You reek of death to me. Not in a gross way, but every time I catch your scent, I get this feeling that you're going to die. Every time I look at you, I get flashes of your lifeless body, surrounded by a pool of blood. When I hear your voice, I can practically hear your screams and groans, as if they're a backing track. And when I shut my eyes after seeing you at some point in the day, my dreams a plagued with your death just playing over and over again. I can't see anything. I can't see who is doing it, how they're going to do it or even when. I just see you dying painfully."

Tears were prickling at her eyes as she continued on. "Sometimes, I'm you. I can feel your pain; feel the life draining out of your body. But when I am you, your eyes are already shut in pain and so I can't see who it is that's doing it. I know, if I was to just see the visions from a few minutes, maybe even seconds beforehand, I could see who it was. But that never happens. I keep living your death every day but I'm no closer to stopping it."

Lydia looked like she was so close to breaking down, but Derek knew she would never do it in front of someone she considered a stranger. She might not even do it in front of him. She saw breaking down as a weakness and the amount of people who had seen her weak could be counted on one hand; 3 of them were no longer around. Derek wrapped his arm around Lydia again, trying to give her comfort in the only way he knew how, physically.

Lydia rested her head against his chest for a moment before pulling herself together and looking up at Derek.

"Don't worry." She said with conviction and determination. "I will figure this out and we will stop it."

That was when Derek finally worked it all out. She had been going out of her way to see him to force the dreams, the emotions and the pain onto herself to work out what was going to happen. She had been avoiding the pack because they would be able to sense her emotions and realise something was wrong. She was feeling sad because of the overwrought emotions these dreams were giving her. And she was feeling guilty because she thought that if he died, it would be her fault for not working out a way to stop it.

He looked at Braeden, who had been silent the whole time, and silently asked her to make herself sparse. Thankfully, she faked a yawn and said she was going to sleep in the spare bed upstairs since everyone was safe down here. When he was Braeden disappear fully up the ladder he turned back to Lydia.

"My death will not be your fault." He said to her as honestly as possible, hoping he could convince her.

"If I have the ability to stop it and don't do everything in my power to work out how it's going to happen, it is my fault. I loved Allison and Aiden. Even though I knew they were going to die, I feel no guilt because I tried to do everything within my power to save them. I warned Allison and I tried to push Aiden away so he would leave. At the time, I didn't recognize why, but I know now. If I don't try my hardest to stop your death it will be my fault because I know somehow I can work it out. I know I can finesse my abilities and harness them to save you." She responded sounding sadder than he had ever known her to be.

It was the curse of the banshee. It wasn't the voices that drove them crazy. It was the repetitive scenes of death that play over in their heads that they are powerless to stop. It was the carnage that they had to endure and see every time they closed their eyes that pushed them over the edge.

"You can't live your life blaming every death you didn't stop on yourself. I've only briefly met a few banshees, and all of them drove themselves crazy dwelling on what they could have done; on who they could have saved; on what they didn't see in time. I don't ever want you to become like them Lydia." Derek explained.

"That's why I need to do everything I can. So I can go to sleep at the end of the day guilt-free. So I can look at myself in the mirror and not hate the person looking back at me." Lydia said tiredly.

Derek looked down at the redhead and realized she was more like Scott than she would ever know. She was giving excuses as if she had selfish reasons for trying to save people. Yet Derek knew the true reason she had to try everything possible was because if she didn't, she would feel like she would let people down. She was carrying the burden of banshee all on her own. She was carrying the burden of every death alone so the rest of the pack wouldn't have to. Nothing he said would have stopped her from doing this. So instead of trying to convince her to stop trying to prevent his death, he decided to take a different route.

"Talk to Scott. Talk to the rest of the pack. Tell them what's going on. If you want to make sure you've explored every avenue, you need to do that. The others are intelligent and may see things you've missed. When you're feeling my emotions, your mind might be clouded and it might be blocking how you would usually look at a situation. And at the very least, it might be able to prepare them for a fight that is possibly coming our way." Derek said, hoping she would take his advice. He didn't care about their opinions on her visions. He just wanted to make sure she felt like she had the support of the pack.

Lydia smiled up at him slightly. "That's not why you want me to tell them, but I'll do it. I'll talk to Scott tomorrow and explain it all."


End file.
